Monthly Archives: June 2011

This last weekend I was offered the chance to go to London to the UK premiere of Transformers Dark of the Moon to interview director Michael Bay, and star (and underwear model) Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Sadly I couldn’t make it due to work commitments (boy do I sound sad) but thankfully some guys from TheTransformers.Net were able to take my place.

In fact, they jumped at the chance of interviewing Michael and Rosie… funny that.

Anyway, the two intrepid Transformers fans travelled down to that London on Sunday to take up their spots on the blue carpet (on the press side, not the fan side) in order to interview the director of the film and the film’s leading lady… and here is the video of their exploits.

As an avid watcher of the Apprentice on BBC1, I often think how I would have fared with some of the apprenticeship jobs that they’ve had to do over the series. Tonight sees the budding apprentices travelling to France where, no doubt, we’ll see which of them are educated in the classic sense of the word (and can pass a sentence or two in French) and which of them opt for the speaking slower, louder and in English tactic of communicating.

Looking back at previous tasks however, it’s clear that some of the ideas on offer from the apprentices are truly shocking. The mobile app task springs immediately to mind, where both teams decided upon an App that simply makes annoying, and not particularly amusing, noises. One app was simply awful, while the other app was awful and mildly offensive – while also alienating the ‘worldwide’ audience by focusing on UK regional accents.

I did notice that one of the other apprentices mentioned the idea of a bubble wrap popper app, which was quickly dismissed in favour of the badly executed regional accents app. This, of course, was a much better idea and would have been far more successful – certainly would have won them the task.

It was, though, the general lack of ideas that I found surprising on this task, and on others. Mobile apps is such a big industry that ideas should have been flowing, although of course they would have been limited with the short, overnight, development time (which is very limiting it has to be said).

The dog food challenge where the budding apprentices attempted to brand a dog food ‘Every Dog’, which could then be broadened out to ‘Every Cat’, ‘Every Horse’ and ‘Every Elephant’ was a monumentally bad idea. Even when the focus group, which contained a vet, said that it wouldn’t work they still went for it.

If only they’d just targeted puppies, as dogs tend to have three stages of dog food during their lives (puppy, adult and senior) they’ve have won the task – as their branding and their advert was very good. It was just the basic idea that was flawed.

I look forward to seeing what they come up with tonight, and who embarrasses themselves with their lack of education or willingness to even attempt the French language.

While in HMV a few weeks ago, browsing around the Blu-Ray section, I was torn between Kick Ass and Scott Pilgrim. With my love of Edgar Wright’s films I opted for Scott Pilgrim, as I hadn’t seen it, and was, in some small part, swayed by the inclusion of exclusive postcards for Scott and each of the evil exes. This small, inexpensive, addition seemed like a good idea, and I remember Metrodome doing a similar thing a few years ago with their Transformers DVDs when they included postcards of the cover illustrations.

This started me thinking. Even the tenth anniversary of the cult-classic (because that’s what the news reporter from HTV Wales called it) Cop on the Edge has been and gone, there’s always the twentieth, twenty-fifth and so on. Collectible postcards of the characters or artwork seems like a good idea… well, an idea nonetheless.

So how much can postcard printing cost? The DVD authoring was done by Eddie Keaton, so that’s all taken care off. The cover design is also done in-house (yeah, I know, it shows) so there’s really no other expense. Even the website itself is over 10 years old, so has something of a web presence already.

All that’s left is the cost of any crap that we want to throw in with it (I say crap in the most loving sense because, postcards aside, the film ain’t gonna be save by freebies).

All that remains is what to include on the postcards, and how many? Naturally there’s the iconic (or derivative, you decide) cover art itself (below). Then there’s the original flyer that was made to promote the screening, way back in September of 1998… Christ I feel old. How about character art? We still have all of the original stills somewhere… I think.

The possibilities are endless (if you consider less than ten endless).

Anyway, I’ll leave you with the trailer and the 10th Anniversary DVD cover – while I go and investigate the costs for postcard printing.